The appearance of this Chinese version of The Loloish Tonal Split Revisited (再論彝語支的聲調衍變) is a source of great satisfaction for me. The original version of this monograph appeared in 1972, and has long been out of print and very difficult to find. There has been a tremendous outpouring of new data on the Tibeto-Burman (TB) language family during the past quarter century, and I have frequently wished I could correct the errors in the monograph and bring it more up to date by adding new material.
During the academic year 1997-1998, I was privileged to welcome Dr. Lin Ying-chin of the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica (Taipei) to Berkeley, as a Visiting Scholar at the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project (STEDT). Dr. Lin is a well-known authority on the extinct (and fiendishly difficult) Xixia language, and has carried out exemplary fieldwork on modern TB languages of the Qiangic group like Muya (Minyag). During her stay at Berkeley, we collaborated on a number of projects involving the archiving and comparative reconstruction of Qiangic materials.
One day I happened to show Ying-chin a copy of TSR, and soon afterward, to my delighted surprise, she announced her intention of translating it into Chinese. Over the next several months we worked together intermittently on this project. She would bring me her draft translation of each section, and we would go over it in detail. It was sometimes slow going, since there were many detailed points to discuss, and even some new terminology to invent. From my point of view, it was a great opportunity to correct some of the more glaring mistakes in the original version, and to add new cognates both from Lolo-Burmese and other TB languages. (This has made it necessary to add a list of language name abbreviations to the front matter.)
Even though I am not a good judge of Chinese literary style, it seems to me that Dr. Lin’s translation is splendid, and very faithful to the original. In fact I would claim that this Chinese version is much better than the original! Ying-chin and I had a very good time working on it together, and I hope that shows through. ii
My sincere thanks to Lin Ying-chin for all her hard work, and to the Academia Sinica for seeing it through the publication process. I look forward to receiving the comments and criticisms of the readers of this new version. Qing dajia zhizheng!

JAM
Berkeley, CA May, 2000